Yes, you killed!..

Anton Kostylev Demons howl, it smells sour and classic literature in Dmitry Meskhiev’s new film “Kamikaze Diary”.

Tradition is tradition. The phrase “Yes, Rodion Romanych, you killed me,” will forever remain a detective culmination for Russian culture. Anyway, the main instinct here is to dial “03” when the “squirrel” is on the way - jumping around the apartment, knocking over bottles and dusty subscription editions of classics. Here, even “Notes from a Dead House”, or “The Kamikaze Diary” by Dmitry Meskhiev, you can’t escape yourself.

Meskhiev is generally a nostalgic person. He made “Cynics” after Mariengof, “Over Dark Water” - a gloomy paraphrase to “June Rain”. And then they began to stir, the demons and the bugs began to cackle, and there was a smell of mud and something else vague and sour. And the strangest and gloomiest movie in recent years appeared.

The aging writer painfully experiences menopause, financial failures and the general bestial structure of the universe. Confused about women. He drinks, of course. Fortunately, he is killed quite quickly - exactly on the same day as the large entrepreneur. A childhood friend of the dear deceased, a serious man who was friends with thieves in law, begins his own investigation. Soon he finds the writer's diary, from which he reconstructs the ugly details of the last days of his life. And along the way, he recalls their childhood - dissolute, street, post-war. Everything will end not so much unexpectedly as in an ornate way - spiders in a jar, a person returns to his sin, like a dog to vomit, and all that. Spirituality and literature.

Just looking at the credits, you realize that you have become the victim of a grandiose conspiracy. Well, let’s say that the main role was played by the wonderful Shakurov, his brother by the amazing Yuri Kuznetsov , the bandit by Garmash, the mistress by Tolstoganov, and in general everything is more than good with the actors - let’s say it doesn’t mean anything. You never know who played where. But Volodarsky as the scriptwriter is a completely different story. If we add to this Meskhiev himself, cameraman Machilsky, who shot “Fan” and “On the Move,” and composer Svyatoslav Kurashov , who collaborated with Kuryokhin and the “Wolf Trio,” you get an insidious company of ironic and seasoned provocateurs.

The cloth mechanical dialogues are reminiscent of the speech of a stroke literary worker re-reading the upcoming Dostoevsky and old issues of the Ogonyok magazine before bed. Alzheimer's of Russian literature. When another burst of nervous, hysterical laughter subsides from yet another, well-crafted phrase, you remember that you’ve already heard this laughter somewhere – at Prigov’s readings. Let's say an investigator. This is not a policeman, but as it is - a Militsaner. And, as in Prigov’s poems or Sorokin’s texts, all this well-tempered nonsense, presented with petrified seriousness. – more than irony, nostalgia or a trick involving dismembering a beautiful lady with a dull saw.

Hiccupping and twitching, the action rolls from banality to odorous folk wisdom, from dead literature to the relics of theology, from unscrupulous farce to degenerate tragedy. Memories of childhood come in strange, twitching flashbacks, overlapping each other like recorded samples. One scene several seconds long can happen in completely different ways, ending with the same slap or scream. In addition to imperfect memory and self-deception, there is pure physiology in this, acting involuntarily - the most valuable discovery for cinema. These flashbacks irritate, then enrage, then begin to stick to your hands like warm, wet chewing gum. The sourish, stale smell turns into a specific local hallucinogen. Fear and disgust of Mtsensk district. And only the dead stand with scythes.

An unbearable, heavy movie, like a heavy corpse. An impressive and gloomy commentary on the modern cultural space, from which only the dead can grow, or the living – but the ethereal. And who killed? Yes, you, Dmitry Dmitrievich, killed...

Yes, you killed!.. - Gazeta.Ru